Chapter 2. Getting off the Ground

We can think of Hazelcast as a library technology—a JAR file that we bring into our application's classpath and integrate with in order to harness its data distribution capabilities. Now, we can go about setting up an application in the many ways that allow us to use various third-party libraries and dependencies. Most modern IDEs can do this for you. Dependency management or build tools such as Maven, Ant, or Gradle can automate these IDEs, and we can manually sort it out ourselves. However, it's now time to jump in at the deep end. In this chapter, we shall study the following topics:

• Downloading Hazelcast
• Creating a basic application with Hazelcast
• Exploring the various simple storage collections
• Fetching and searching stored data
• Setting limits and understanding what happens when we reach the limits